Fax messaging continues to be an important avenue for the delivery of secure messages between individuals worldwide despite the proliferation of email message delivery services. Traditional fax messaging services require both a dedicated fax machine and a dedicated fax number to receive a fax transmission. Modern fax messaging services, such as those provided by j2 Cloud Services, Inc. of Hollywood, Calif., have eliminated the requirement for a dedicated fax machine, utilizing the Internet to provide greater flexibility for subscribers to transmit and receive fax messages via email. A subscriber of a modern fax messaging service is assigned a direct inward dialing (DID) telephone number, which the subscriber distributes to others who wish to send a fax message to the subscriber. The DID telephone number is in effect the subscriber's individual fax number. When an incoming fax transmission is received in a fax server at a particular DID telephone number, the fax messaging service generates a fax message from the fax transmission in a format that is suitable for transmission over a data network such as the Internet, and sends the fax message to the subscriber (e.g., to the subscriber's email address).
As mentioned above, fax messaging services typically assign a separate DID telephone number to each subscriber. The DID telephone number is a unique telephone number that is different from the subscriber's other phone numbers (e.g., mobile phone number, home phone number, work phone number.) An assigned separate DID telephone number has drawback. For instance, subscribers to the fax messaging services are forced to remember and inform others of this assigned separate DID telephone number, along with any other telephone number that may need to be distributed (e.g., a work/home telephone number). Having to remember multiple telephone numbers may be unwieldy, and lead to confusion. To solve this problem, a fax messaging service that has a fax server may provide software that runs in a mobile device, e.g., a mobile phone such as a cellular phone or a smartphone. The software enables the subscriber to receive a fax message that originated as a fax transmission that was addressed to the telephone number of the subscriber's mobile device, thus reducing or obviating the need for a separate DID telephone number. This capability also reduces the administrative burden on the provider of the fax messaging service since the provider does not need to assign and maintain a DID telephone number for each subscriber.
For example, the software may process a fax transmission as follows. When the subscriber answers an incoming call at the mobile device, the software “listens” to the answered call and detects (e.g., based on audible fax tones) whether the call includes a fax transmission. If so, the software will prompt the subscriber on the touchscreen of the mobile device as to whether or not the fax transmission should be accepted. If yes, then the software will place an outgoing call to a fax server (while the incoming fax call is on hold) and once the fax server answers it will conference (or merge) the incoming call with the outgoing call, so that the fax transmission can then continue with the fax server accepting the transmission. Once the transmission has been completed, the incoming call and the outgoing call are terminated. The fax server will then make the fax transmission that it has just received available in a format that can be downloaded over the Internet for viewing, either within an app running in the mobile phone of the subscriber or pushed to an email address of the subscriber.